Good tip. Actually I use to physically disconnect the old drive during the installation process.

>Be sure when you boot to install Win7 on the new drive that you boot from the DVD, not your old C: drive. Otherwise your new drive will be D: and you can't change that. Boot from DVD, install win7 on new drive and then when it reboots as part of the install process it will see itself as drive C: forever after.
>
>>BIOS -- got it. Thanks.
>>
>>>No more jumpers, but you have to select the new drive as a boot device in the BIOS. And you must set the old HD as not bootable.
>>>
>>>>Sounds like a good approach. I have not been inside this PC before and need to make sure it has a spare drive bay.
>>>>
>>>>The last time I added a hard drive I had to play around with jumper switches to let the machine know which drive was primary and which was secondary. Is that still the way it works?
>>>>
>>>>>What I usually do, is to mount a new hard drive, and install everything from scratch on this HD. I keep my old HD as D:, which means that I am easily able to restore important files from it later.
>>>>>
>>>>>>My main home computer has accumulated enough junk that it has become a little iffy, even after a recent upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate. Installs and uninstalls are particularly dicey. Also, the hard drive is only 160 GB and down to about 30 GB free. I am considering two alternatives. One is to migrate everything to what has been a spare computer used only for developmentm making the current main computer the spare. The other is to buy a bigger hard drive and start fresh on that. The purpose of this post is to do a sanity check on the plan if I take door number two. Am I missing anything here? ---
>>>>>>
>>>>>>1. Back up everything from the current HD to an external USB hard drive. This is already happening. The USB drive has backups from Norton Ghost and a daily automated backup by Backup4All. For good measure, I use Carbonite to keep everything backed up on the internet.
>>>>>>2. Test that I have a bootable DVD disc. I think the Ghost install/recovery disc will do.
>>>>>>3. Replace the hard drive.
>>>>>>4. Reinstall Windows 7 clean.
>>>>>>5. Reinstall applications.
>>>>>>6. Restore data files from the external HD.
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Any gotchas I should be aware of or am overlooking?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Also, if I do buy a new hard drive, any recommendations of sellers?
>>>>>>
>>>>>>Thanks!